Filmed in 2003, shelved, featured at the Toronto
Film Festival in 2005, shelved again, released on DVD overseas, and now
appearing in theaters stateside, one wonders why Slow Burn wasn't just
dumped completely. The reasoning behind the huge delay is fairly obvious. The
movie gets so much wrong, it can't even get the ticking clock convention right. It starts off a very unconvincing take on Rashomon and ends with a lot
more than traces of The Usual Suspects. It's insignificant throughout
and nearly intolerable by the end, with writer/director Wayne Beach clearing out
the market of convoluted script machinations (It's a red herring discount
special! Every false plot move must go!). It isn't just the extended climax of
revelations of secret identities and confusing character motivations that's
convoluted, though, and the whole movie piles on doubt and conflicting
perspectives of the same story. It might be interesting if the ultimate outcome
weren't telegraphed half an hour into the movie. The twists of this movie are
like a dice toss. Pick a character, and at some point, Beach is going to
convince you he/she is the villain, only to toss it aside thirty seconds later
for yet another surprise.

The movie starts off with a voice-over by Ray
Liotta's District Attorney Ford Cole telling how surprise is the enemy of the
prosecutor. It's a sad reminder of how far down the actor's career has gone
from the moment he sold Goodfellas with his opening narration. He also
speaks of Assistant DA Nora Timmer (Jolene Blalock), who, as a woman of mixed
race, can get at cases he and his other prosecutors cannot (a silent montage of
her accompanies, a moment where she slams her hands on a table showing us that
she's tough). Cole is driving with reporter Ty Trippin (Chiwetel Ejiofor, and
no, I did not make up that character name), who has come to town to interview
the DA, who is also making a run for mayor. We also get a lot of backstory
here, and it's something about rival gangs and housing projects and industrial
deals and a mysterious crime leader of Keyser Soze-proportions named Danny
Lewton. It all passes through the ear and out the other side, though, because
it's too much unconnected nonsense too soon. Anyway, Cole is brought into the
police station because Nora has shot and killed a man she claims raped her in
her home.

The story seems fine, but in comes Luther Pinks
(James Todd Smith, or, as the credits expand, aka LL Cool J, and no, I am not
making that character name up either), who tells Cole that the shooting was not
self-defense but murder. He also has his doubts about Nora's heritage. Well,
no kidding. Jolene Blalock's skin is unconvincingly and inconsistently darkened
here, and maybe it's just a "trick of the light," as Luther says, but it's more
than a bit distracting. Then again, Luther also infers situations and people by
the way they smell, giving us such gems of dialogue as, "This place smells like
pot roast. Burnt pot roast." He distrusted the grapefruit-smelling Nora from
the beginning when she met his now deceased buddy Jeffrey (Mekhi Phifer) at a
record store and asked Jeff for a ride home. Or at least that's the story
Luther's spinning, because Nora tells Cole that Jeff was stalking her. Let us pause
here for a moment for another of Luther's descriptions of Nora's aroma: "She
stood there smelling like a tangerine: ripe and ready to be peeled." Can we
trust Luther? After all, how is he privy to information to which he was not a
witness? It seems Jeff was a man of little secrets and even less sense.

There are some other problems, too. A gas leak
has erupted in the housing projects area of the city. A gas leak, I repeat,
because, yes, it will be important. And yes, when it does become vital that the
audience realize this was set up early in the movie for a good reason, Beach
does indeed have a rapid-fire montage of people saying the phrase "gas leak"
over and over again, just so we know how smart he was to set it up early on. I
must stop again, though, so we may hear yet another of Luther's nasal readings
of Nora: "She walked in smelling like mashed potatoes, and every man within
thirty feet wanted to be the gravy." There are tons of flashbacks thrown in,
primarily of Nora in bed with either Cole or Jeff, telling them all about how
you can put on a new face if you don't like the one life's given you (before
putting on a mask to emphasize the point and make a sex scene pretty damn funny)
or talking about Lewton some more. She's not too good with pillow talk, but she
turns a moment of threatening to kill Jeff into a soft-core porn moment,
complete with drums kicking in when the mood shifts.

To say the movie is a mess is
to be polite, and the only reason to stay through till the end is to find out
who this Lewton guy really is. If you make it through the seemingly unstoppable
lineup of false accusations and obvious revelations, you will be disappointed by
the answer(s).. At one point, Cole turns the tables on Luther, for once giving
him a lesson in odor: "I can smell all kinds of shit." That makes two of us.